Abstract

Since digital audio is encoded as discrete samples of the audio waveform, much can be said about a recording by the statistical properties of these samples. In this paper, a dataset of CD audio samples is analysed; the probability mass function of each audio clip informs a feature set which describes attributes of the musical recording related to loudness, dynamics and distortion. This allows musical recordings to be classiﬁed according to their “distortion character”, a concept which describes the nature of amplitude distortion in mastered audio. A subjective test was designed in which such recordings were rated according to the perception of their audio quality. It is shown that participants can discern between three different distortion characters; ratings of audio quality were signiﬁcantly different (F(1; 2) = 5:72; p < 0:001; eta^2 = 0:008) as were the words used to describe the attributes on which quality was assessed (�Chi^2(8; N = 547) = 33:28; p < 0:001).This expands upon previous work showing links between the effects of dynamic range compression and audio quality in musical
recordings, by highlighting perceptual differences.